IT AIN’T EASY BEING INDIAN: Nov 2017

At this writing I woke to a Winter Wonderland. Yeah, the meteorologists did predict snow coming but somehow, even after a lifetime spent in Da Nort’land, it’s still a big deal. Just seven days ago I was sitting outside in shorts with my dear friend Lorri and our two little pooches Caesar and Mitzi, gamboling about on a leaf-littered green lawn and enjoying the day. We laughed, talked and had to hide from a nosey neighbor and all was perfect. Sigh.

I knew it was the very last day we would get to enjoy this type of weather this year, and that made it especially bittersweet. We got what is called “Indian Summer” – which is shortened like every-thing else the colonizers left us. Why is that? Can’t they share regular summer? Geez. They just greedily took it all and left us on lands not wanted in the treaty days, but that is changing. Watch out.

The snow is still falling and sooooo pretty, but it also took out my satellite. I don’t know what to do. 😉 I do like the first snowfall, mainly because I don’t have to shovel. But I like the last snow better cuz that means spring is coming. Until then my friends bundle up and burrow in.

Rezberry hosts annual dinners for the ‘Elders’ and I now happen to qualify. Yay! I made it this far! The Tribe made the best venison I’ve ever eaten, with delicious sides. And the Fond du Lac Rez Historical Society put on a slide show of older photographs for the attendees. It was a lot of fun seeing people because I don’t get out and about often, so there was that and $25 bucks too! I told a former co-worker that I dyed my hair so I wouldn’t look old at the Elders dinner. lol! I’m still vain but I’m not the only one, there was plenty of “Indian Black” hair colors there too, including men.

Someone (miigwech) plowed the driveway so I can get used to the trudge-walk I adopt for weather. I can now go get my mail, hoping that some thieving little Rez rats didn’t get to it before I do. Might be a check in there, I always have hope.

I was at a local pub waiting for a friend to show up when I overheard an irate white man saying he would rather burn up his cabin than let the Indians have it. He is, or was, on the town school board and is well known to people. He appeared to have a very comfortable existence, considering his bulk and being able to speak his mind without any censure – except from another white man who said if he did burn a cabin, it would be considered arson. But even that didn’t shut him up.

He was yelling about the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota, who did not renew the leases for non-band members on the lake. The Tribe needs the land for their own members for whom housing is scarce – so they can have homes…on their own lands. I say here that against my own nature I did not engage him because I wanted to hear everything he had to say about white people getting kicked off land.

Irony much? I had to hold in a crow of laughter and not smile with glee. Keep talking big colonial man, there isn’t anything you can do about it. Which brings me to the entitled ones; those of white privilege with their pallid, pink skins. I am very obviously Indian even though I don’t wear regalia every day to prove it. He definitely saw me listening to him but he still felt comfortable enough to expound his racist views without any-one, including me, to disagree with him. I already stated why I held off.

What I’m saying is that racism is something every person who is not white has experienced every day in their lives. For the record, it really sucks and I hate it. It’s nonsensical to an aware, informed, well-read HUMAN BEING that there is anything such as ‘race’ at all. Like organized religion, racial differences are a construct created by white colonists all over the globe – for the stealing and control of the natural resources.

Those who have control over the natural resources are destroying our Mother Earth. They must be planning to move to the Moon and leave us to clean up their ugly, poisonous mess. Good riddance. See how them Aliens greet those greedy, hateful, disgusting facsimiles of earth creatures –aka the 1%.

For the dear readers who wrote me, I’m a terrible correspondent and I apologize. My broken right arm impedes me too – not an excuse. I’ll do better.